Kathleen Ryan: Daisy Chain

Kathleen Ryan's sculptures play with expectation and desire by using material irony and art historical tropes to subvert expectations of value. Her work "Bad Fruit" series features decaying fruit made from glittering beads, gemstones, and found items, illustrating her fascination with how objects bring meaning and carry a history. The selection of work in this volume presents Ryan's fruits alongside other large-scale models of evanescent vegetation, igniting a sense of disorientation and mythic wonder through its materiality, scale, and evocative power.

Format: Hardback
Length: 104 pages
Publication date: 30 November 2022
Publisher: Karma

Artist Kathleen Ryan, hailing from New York, captivates audiences with her captivating sculptures in the Bad Fruit series. These works take the form of vintage decorative crafts that have been magnified to imposing proportions, creating a striking visual impact. Ryan's meticulous technique, combined with a painterly sensitivity to color and a wry sense of humor, showcases the profound capacity of art to both evoke and halt the passage of time.

Through her innovative approach, Ryan challenges conventional notions of value and aesthetics by employing material irony and art historical tropes. She skillfully fashions decaying fruit from a diverse array of shimmering beads, gemstones, and found objects, illustrating her fascination with the "how objects bring meaning and carry a history." By subverting expectations of preciousness, synthetic acrylic and glass beads mimic the glistening texture of flesh, while clusters of semiprecious stones take on the role of pathogens, such as penicillium digitatum.

The selection of work in this volume presents Ryan's fruits alongside other large-scale models of evanescent vegetation, eliciting a sense of disorientation and mythic wonder through its materiality, scale, and evocative power. This fully illustrated catalog features insightful essays by Bob Nickas, Shannon Mattern, and Heather Davis, further enhancing our understanding and appreciation of Ryan's artistic vision.

Weight: 939g
Dimension: 290 x 241 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781949172744